Quick Synopsis: Lang Leav selected her favorite pieces from her two previous collections Love & Misadventure and Lullabies and interwove them with new pieces of work to form Memories.

I had read Love & Misadventure many a moons ago as my first dip into the unguided world of poetry and instantly fell in love with her writing style. Since Lang Leav chose pieces from her previous collections, I definitely recognized the poems from her first collection.

The design of this book is so absolutely adorable as well. It is her first hardcover, I believe, and has a built in ribbon bookmark which just truly adds to the cuteness of presentation. Among the first few pages is an introduction from Lang Leav which states that the book is presented in this way to allow for the original owner to gift it along with their memories. The book itself is a type of keepsake, which again, is the absolute cutest.

Leav’s work is so memorable in a simplistic way. I know that sounds kind of bad but it’s not meant to sound that way but it’s so true. Her work is so whimsically short and to the point, but this really allows for the true message to hit you instantly, and where it hurts, might I add. Her work is so truly poignant in such an intensely lovely way. It’s easy to just delve deep into her work and just scarf down each delightful image like a spoon full of ice cream in just one short sitting.

If you’ve ever wanted to start dabbling into the world of poetry, I would start with Lang Leav, especially Memories because each piece spoke miles to my heart.

Remember how I said I was taking a Verse Writing class? Well this is an assigned reading from this class. I had originally never truly saw myself finishing the book. I wasn’t too interested from the beginning and honestly, I never actually gained any interest. It was always kind of just there.

The book is split up into five sections ranging from Love, Death, Alcohol, etc. Each very short sections that could be read in less than 20 minutes each. There were some pretty great poems but they were hidden among rather meh poems.

Here’s a problem I’ll always have and have always had with poetry: It just reads pretentious. Maybe it’s just me (It’s probably only me) but I feel like some poetry tries to sound too smart or just like, it’s trying too hard. Which is one of the main reasons that I was excited for this class.

But yeah, I feel like this book is full of poems like this. However, I do sort of feel like my opinions about poetry are growing with my age and experience, because before, I probably would have just written off the whole book as “TOO PRETENTIOUS”.

I hate to compare this book to another poetry book about love I’ve recently read, but I still will, and honestly I liked the other one better. But this book wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t my speed.

This semester, I’m taking a Verse Writing course. Hopefully I won’t offend anyone by this but I’ve never really been into verse writing/poetry. It has always been hard for me to get into or even, at some instances, even understand poetry. But, the point of this is that I don’t read very much poetry and I just started this semester.

I picked this up on a whim. I thought “Hey, I’m taking a poetry class, why not read some poetry?” And it’s a super adorable cover, which I later found out was illustrated by Lang Leav.

It is an incredibly short and extremely easy read. Her poems are not very difficult to understand or relate to. They have a sort of whimsical tone to them which instantly drew me in. I found myself marking many pages of poems for future use. There were only few that I wasn’t too hot on.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It gave me funny swoony feelings in my tummy, all while reminding me what it’s like during the beginning stages of love ❤

(while also reminding me what it’s like to be going through a break up..)

I would definitely recommend this to new poetry readers because it is very easy to get into. I’m not too positive about seasoned poetry fans. I’d recommend it to them (because I loved it) but from what I’ve seen elsewhere, I wouldn’t know how they’d like it.

Advertisements

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.